I don’t get the hatred of this font, the sort recounted in this BBC article. I think it a pleasant and mildly goofy font, quite suitable for friendly or informal occasions. It’s just that I certainly didn’t think it suitable for an official document like this one!

David Rider‘s Toronto Star article examining the fight between the NDP incumbent and Liberal challenger in the provincial riding of Davenport where I live caught my interest. Given the thin margin of Jonah Schein’s victory last time, a swing away from the NDP could easily cost him the seat. All Toronto could well become another Liberal stronghold provincially.

This might even be of pan-Canadian interest, since the boundaries of the provincial riding of Davenport correspond to those of the federal riding of the same name. In the 2011 federal election, the NDP successfully displaced the Liberal incumbent there. I myself was part of the orange wave that swept urban Ontario. If the NDP suffers provincial losses, what happens at the federal level?

Davenport is home to many Portuguese-Canadians and a rising number of Vietnamese and Spanish speakers. Sharing an MPP are Queen Street artists, young professionals in The Junction, working-class tenants of Symington Place apartments, and old-world retirees strolling Corso Italia.

The vote here could signal which party clinches Ontario, predicts Lorne Bozinoff, president of the polling firm Forum Research and a Davenport resident. “I think this is the number-one bellwether riding in Ontario,” he says. “If the NDP doesn’t keep the seat, it means a trend,” and likely a Liberal government.

Working hard to ensure that does not happen is NDP MPP Jonah Schein, 39, elected in 2011 and now in a testy rematch with Cristina Martins, 48, whose Liberals are doing everything they can to retake their former bastion.

At Sandor-Kerr’s doorstep, Martins tells him the NDP supported the 2012 and 2013 budgets without making that support contingent on electrification of the contentious Union Station-Pearson link.

[. . .]

“That the person who doesn’t live here, who doesn’t ride transit here, is billing herself as the transit champion ….” Schein shakes his head. “That train line has been a disaster from the beginning in the way the Liberals have handled it.”

Despite west-end residents’ warnings of polluted neighbourhoods, the Liberal government announced diesel trains would run on the line when it opens before the 2015 Pan Am Games.

The Liberals recently switched tracks, however, vowing to retrofit the line for quicker, cleaner electric trains as part of a $29-billion, 10-year transit plan.

Guest posting a week ago at The Power and the Money, Martin Skold predicted that war in the future–non-nuclear war, at least–would proceed through four stages: rapid attrition, stalemate, mobilization, and insurgency in successfully occupied territories). The first stage would be critical.

In the past two World Wars, it was actually the norm for the combatants to fail to knock each other out of the fight initially. The great exception appears to be France, which suffered what can only be described as a total knockout in the first round of World War 2. In all other cases, although one side or the other might make some gains, it usually failed to completely destroy its opponent. One could point to the Battle of Britain, operations on the Russian Front in 1941, initial Japanese gains in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, the stalemate on the Marne in September 1914, the inability of Germany to eliminate Russia after its victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes at about the same time, and so on.

There are reasons for this. In many cases, the wrong set of assumptions was in play: Germany, for example, did not begin serious industrial mobilization in World War 2 until after Stalingrad (arguably, after it had already lost), trusting in the ability of the blitzkrieg to deliver quick and decisive battlefield victories. In other cases, it simply took time for resources to become available: Britain, which had always focused as much of its defense budget as possible on its navy, entered World War 1 with a professional army (the crack units in the British Expeditionary Force, who, according to legend, fired their rifles so rapidly as to appear to be using machine-guns), only to enroll large numbers of after hostilities commenced (the so-called “Kitchener Battalions” that were slaughtered on the Somme two years later). In all such cases, however, the great powers were close enough to evenly matched to be able to survive the initial shock and awe.

This scenario would probably prevail in the world of the 2020s. (Right now, the United States has a good chance of achieving a rapid knockout blow in a conventional conflict.) The trend towards professionalization (absence of conscription in most big states) and reliance on high technology (the inflation-adjusted costs of major weapons systems being significantly higher than in past wars), combined with the likelihood that at least one side would not have a long warning time prior to the onset of hostilities suggests that replacing lost equipment and personnel would require more mobilization and preparation than either side would likely have at the start of conflict.

In other words, unless one side or the other prevails decisively in the first weeks of the war, the initial forces of both sides are likely to be destroyed. Let’s first consider personnel. Most modern militaries invest large sums of money and large quantities of time in training their personnel. That makes lost personnel difficult to replace, particularly in the absence of conscription, which few states (and no great powers except Russia) employ. For that matter, mass conscription by definition implies sacrificing quality for quantity: professional armies throughout history have invested more training resources in each individual soldier, sailor, or airman than militaries based on mass conscription. The IDF and South Korea are partial exceptions, but those are armies geared for territorial defense (and in Israel, occupation of hostile territory) not expeditionary warfare.

The size of modern armies is small for this reason: in terms of military participation rates, the modern great powers are closer to medieval kingdoms than to pre-World War 1 states. (Modern great powers have less than 1% of their populations in the military, including reserves, compared to 5% of European populations on the muster rolls in 1914.) Although some of this reflects a choice (conscious or unconscious) some of it is a function of technology and the time it takes to learn to use it. It is quite debatable whether a modern state could replace combat pilots, for example, at the same rate as Britain and Germany did in 1940 — even allowing for the fact that both countries tolerated a much lower standard of proficiency than the prewar norm.

The discussion in the comments is interesting, with some (like Will Baird) suggesting that technological units like drones–inexpensive and usable from the start–could be game-changers for this scenario.

Back in March, The Daily Beast‘s Emma Beals had a nice article about Judy Feld Carr. A Canadian Jewish musicologist, Carr was responsible for the successful flight of Syria’s remnant Jewish community to safety. (Her prediction that, if Syrian Jews had stayed, they would have risked slaughter seems sadly correct.)

In the late 1970’s, Feld Carr, a Canadian mother and musicologist, was reading a newspaper when she was struck by an article about 12 SyrianJewish men who tried to escape into Turkey overland from Qamishli, in the north of the country. They stepped on a land mine and Syrian border guards watched them die.

She was so moved by the story that she decided to track down members of Syria’s Jewish community. She began cold-calling numbers in Syria until she eventually hit upon a contact. “I sent a telegram to the Rabbi in Damascus asking if he needed religious books and prepaid [for his response].” she explains. “Who would have ever believe, an answer came back with a shopping list! That was the beginning, the first opening since 1948.”

In the decades following the creation of the state of Israel, Syria’s Jewish community had become isolated, says Sarian Roffe, a historian of the Syrian Jewish community. “After Israel’s creation that was it. They shut the doors because they didn’t want people to go to Israel and fight against them,” she says. “So the doors to leave Syria were closed and there was increased persecution.”

There was also enforced segregation—Jewish residents of Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli were forced to live only in certain neighborhoods and initially had to seek permission to travel further than three kilometers from their homes.

Feld Carr’s relationship with the Damascus Rabbi started to develop into more frequent coded telegrams and secret messages written into religious books. Eventually, she says, some members of the community managed to leave the country and meet with her. To do so, they had to leave family members behind as ‘collateral’. “This one older couple came to meet me and told me what was happening in Syria.” she explains. “Then somebody went to Aleppo in the north and asked me, ‘Is there any way to get my brother out?’ And that’s how I started. It was crazy. I ransomed him. I started buying people!”

io9 reported last night that ISEE-3, a space probe launched in 1978 and at risk of abandonment after NASA stopped funding, was successfully contacted by a crowdfunded effort.

ISEE 3 is a spacecraft from the 1970s currently creeping back up on Earth orbit. NASA abandoned it, but after a crowdfunding campaign, a team of citizen-scientists visited Arecibo with homebrew-hardware and made first-contact. Communications are re-established, and everything looks good to recover the craft!

After establishing that we can hear the ISEE signal loud and clear, the next stage was to open up two-way communications by giving the spacecraft commands. At the start of this campaign, we didn’t have the code, hardware, or knowledge of how to do that, but with a lot of work, your financial assistance, and a bit of luck, the team pulled together a new hardware emulator to speak to the craft in a language it understands.

Communication requires a hardware amplifier installed in the dish at Arecibo. After a lot of fiddling around and even an earthquake, everything was ready.The team has been waiting since Friday last week for permission from NASA to go ahead with first contact. Every day of delay was a mounting risk, as orbital dynamics has no patience for paperwork.

More, including links, are at io9. While the team is still waiting to get data back from the probe as to its functionality, it may well be launched on a new mission thanks to this crowdfunding.

Back in February, Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog predicted the loss of the spacecraft. It’s nice to know that this prediction was wrong.

Antipope Charlie Stross argues that the publishing industry, beset by consolidations, is trying unsuccessfully to move from an artisan model of literary production to something new. Would that something new could be found and made to work.

The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper that tries to model the atmosphere and climate of the exoplanet Gliese 581g, potentially Earth-like but tidally locked.

Languages of the World’s Asya Perelstvaig notes that California is exceptionally diverse language-wise.

Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Erik Loomis notes that the ability of journalist Nicholas Kristof to be fooled by an alleged anti-prostitution activist in Cambodia prone to making things up fits in a long Progressive history of being easily fooled about things Progressives care about..

Torontoist introduces the new Fort York branch of the Toronto library system.

Towleroad’s David Mixner interviews GLBT activists in Italy about their challenges.

The Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Volokh notes, in discussing the underemployment of many minorities at Google relative to their shares of the American population, the ways in which Asians are assimilated to the white majority, at least rhetorically.

Window on Eurasia links to a Russian journalist’s analysis of the consequences of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It’s bad for Russia internationally, he concludes, but a good way for the state to consolidate its control domestically.